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Home Towns Fort Bragg, California Glass Beach

Glass Beach, just north of Fort Bragg is famous far beyond California. And yet, it is nothing more than a former dump site. Until 1967, this beach (like pretty much everything else in Fort Bragg) was owned by the Union Lumber Company. Locals referred to it as "The Dumps" and since there was no other place for household garbage, the beach served as the local dump for over 100 years.

Sometimes fires would be lit to reduce the size of the trash pile and what was left by the fire was taken by the ocean – except for the glass coming from thousands of jars and bottles. That got grated into small pieces and then polished into pebbles, Being heavier than sand, it gradually replaced everything else at the beach.

Our own pictures (like the one on the very top) didn't turn out as shiny as the pictures above, taken by very lucky photographers. The left picture was posted with a geocache that is located at this beach, the other two are from the beach's wikipedia site. But, of course, we took our own pictures too (below), including the obligatory "Bernd" shot.

Like most of the northern California coast, the area is blanketed by fog ten months a year, as our own picture (bottom left) proves. But one can get very lucky, like the two geocachers who took the other two pictures.

One has to be amazed about how forgiving nature is. Instead of striking the polluters with lightning, it took something incredibly nasty (a dump) and turned it into something incredibly beautiful!

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